While our primary goal is to engage our own Maricopa faculty and staff, we welcome others interested in hybrid/blended learning to join in. The discussion board is open to anyone to read, but to post there you need to register and create an account.

This is part of our goal to not only talk about hybrid formats, but to engage in hybrid format activities.

See more on the event details and how to register.

In my recent Auricle article A filling station model of e-learning? I suggested that integrated mobile multimedia players and communication devices could be the 'googly' which catches advocates of centralized e-learning solutions unawares. So are the major proprietary interests responding to this? Apparently not. But ...

At least one vendor has now pitched in to this space. If you really can't bear to be away from your Blackboard calendar, announcements, and course content, and you've got a mainstream PDA, then ArcStream Solutions' BlackboardToGo apparently wants to be your 'filling station'.

He is asking to compare these solutions, which are not cheap, to the raging excitement over "podcasting" a technology meme barely 8 weeks old, but spreading like wildfire. I have no grand insight, but my gut says that things like IM, weblogs, podcasting have a gravitational tug at people because they are simpler technologies that provide that something personally important.

For the most part, IMUO (In My Uninformed Opinion) the big monolithical enterprise solutions for elearning serve mostly to reinforce the learning via lecture paradigm ("record your lectures to stream via the internet!") that leave the new generation.... well yawning in ennui.

After all these years of "course management systems" (and is learning really about "managing courses"?), they still are completely structured wrong in that the main organizational scheme for them is the course (which is ephemeral) rather than the learner (who hopefully will stick around). When the course expires or is archived or deleted after the semester, there goes all the student's work. During the brief existence of the "course" all of their work is filed away in different iron shoeboxes labeled "Chemistry" "Composition", "Sociology" with no affordance to connect between the boxes, no integration across disciplines, no record saved of achievement and progress. The semester ends, grades transmitted to the registrar, and flusssssshhhhhhhh goes all the work that took place.

Why is this so? Ahhh, it was an easier way to program the systems back in the mid 1990s. Time for a change.

But the best thing about Derek's article is grabbing a good new term to kick around:

Finally, what's a googly? Nothing to do with Google I'm afraid; I just borrowed a cricket term. The BBC's Sports Academy defines it thus:

"A googly, or a "wrong'un", is a delivery which looks like a normal leg spinner but actually turns towards the batsmen, like an off break, rather than away from the bat."

Or, to put it another way ... sometimes unexpected things happen that changes everything:)

Thus, not having ever known it, I am a major fan of "googlies".

The October 1 meeting was at Phoenix College, where we had a demo from a faculty member, Pam Petty, who was tired of the limited capabilities of the Blackboard gradebook, and has integrated WebGrade, the web version of MicroGrade, software that has been used in our system a long time. In her course, Pam just hides the Blackboard gradebook link, and ads the left side link for students to go log in to the WebGrade site.

Next, Accounting faculty Sid Ford, share some results from his teaching of the same class in a face to face format and and online (actually more of a hybrid since in person testing is required) format. He shared "facts", "student opinions", and his "own opinions" on what worked well. We have his presentation available as an MLX package.

One of the strongest reactions was a slide showing an excerpt of a stat he provides his online students that cited his online student average was better than his face to face students, but more importantly, students who scored above 90 had more than 2500 page views of the course content, while students with averages below 70, had 926 page views.

It seems an interesting way to get the message out to students to spend more time with the material (??).

We also had a quick hands on demo with "Pluck", a free, Windows based Internet Explorer plug-in that ads shared folders, RSS readers to the browser. It has a lot of options which may have confused the audience in a quick demo, but fortunately, Billie Hughes form Phoenix College had prepared an online guide to using Pluck that has made available.

The biggest outcome was watching people see what RSS could bring them.

The we had the door prizes; they love the door prizes.

Next month it is a theme of Multimedia in the Humanities at South Mountain Community College.

It was very well done instructional design, following the ADDIE formula to a "T". There were objectives, and a table of contents, and practice, and a cute character to lead us through the content (crash test dummy), it had some Flash animations, and pop up windows with extra information. It was classic, the way it has been taught in all the schools. It had a good mix of media, and generated a pretty color certificate when I was done.

So do I have a beef?

Well, yes. It was so textbook, it was boring and predictable. Despite the Flash animations, clean graphics, the basic navigation was Next button. read. Next Button. Read. Click. Read. Click read. Next. Next. Next.

Content carefully chunked into antiseptic morsels. I got lightheaded.

This is all fine, but I contrast this to how I learn on the job as I need it. For example, recently I accidently discovered a server we have that is used to run some listservs has not been sending out mail since March! (some pretty quite lists, eh? I was hoping to create new ones). I've recently lost my part-time programmer how had been doing the admin, so it was time to roll up the unix sleeves, and poke around. I found the log files and saw that no mail was going out via sendmail (I knew that). I experimented sending email from the command line and noted the error messages. I did a Google and found the sendmail site, and drilled down to find some relevant issues related to our Linux server.

Realizing this was beyond my admin skills, I called up a former programmer on iChat, who is in California. He offered to look into it, logged on to the server, and spent some time installing PostFix to replace sendmail, and gave some suggestions to where I'd have to edit some config files.

It works now. There is no next-next-next path to my everyday informal, experimental, iterative learning and I rely in my circle of online experts to help out when they can, or to dig until I can find an answer or an alternative approach. I repeat this almost every day, and my own dynamic form of learning as doing makes learning by lockstep lesson, well, painful.

Well skip to the end of the story.

I glazed through half the content, and reading I had 3 attempts at the post -test, I jumped into it 3 chapters short of the end of the lesson. My school career was full of multiple choice exams I passed not because I knew the content, but because I knew how to dissect multiple choice exams. This one too was easy to pick out the correct answers for content I had not seen, and I scored a 15/15.

I struggle with the single modes of instruction put out there, knowing that there are students that need and thrive in the structure if a tightly designed ID approach, and others who find it is the equivalent of fingernails scraping down the chalkboard (he kids, what is a chalkboard?).

Our systems still aim for one size fits all approaches that miss the mark for learners on the edges. And the edges are not just fringes.

Anyhow, I am now certified for driving official vehicles the next 3 years.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx/slip.php?item=1264

The subject merits almost an entire course in itself, but we boiled it down to sending them to to excellent web tutorials:

(1) Intellectual Property Law: Why Should I Care?- Carlos And Eddie in 'Rock Machine' is a nicely designed site geared for students based on the story of the antics of two cartoon drawn college students.

(2) University of Texas Copyright Tutorial has a great wealth of information found inside the UT Crash Course on Copyright

They were to review each site, take the simple online quiz from each, and post a discussion board message about their "scoires" and what they learned. Unfortunately, it seems we needed to spell out very specific questions for them to respond to besides "I liked the site".

However, our follow-up activity this week is soaring like an eagle! We have invited a guest expert, an associate dean of instruction from one of our colleges that has probably the most experience in this area. Dr. Mary Lou Mosley participated a few years back (as the only rep from a community college) in a national task force of educators and copyright holders to develop fair use guidelines for educators. She has a great presentation online called "©opyright Doesn't Mean "Copy it Outright!".

The activity was for them to pose two specific questions (related to the course or content they teach) on copyright, fair use, intellectual property-- Mary Lou offered to visit the discussion area once on three days this week. This is also turning out to be a great example of the power of using the internet to bring in remote experts-- typically people think of doing this as live chat sessions, but with our smaller class size and schedules, synchronous meeting is not feasible.

Some questions already posed:

This seems to me a whole lot of clicking. Click Manage Course. Click View Some Students. Click Deselect All Students. Click the 3 students I need to enter grades on. Scroll 3-4 screen widths to the right to find the item. Click Edit. Enter scores. Click Update. Now I am stuck seeing just these three students. Now have to select :View All Students form the top menu to get the full class view.

I can do this, but each "click" is another CGI script processed. It adds up.

But that was not my intent of this post. Based on one of our previous Attendance Quizzes (short quizzes we use to get feedback and quick checks on previous week's work), it seemed the class wanted more detailed instructions. So last week;'s activities on finding Web Resources, I did that.

Now I can tell at the end of the week by the questions coming in from 2 students.... THEY ARE NOT READING THE INSTRUCTIONS AT ALL... so it does not matter how much detail I write??? If I do not clarify, or link them back to the instructions they did not read, am I not doing my job (could you follow the quadruple negatives).

Writing instructions seems to be like and endless task of whittling a stick. You keep cutting, turning, cutting, turning, and it just never seems quite as sharp as you think it can be. But at some point, you just stick a hotdog on the stick, and hang it over the fire., It is done.

I will try and share the simple assignments later as MLX packages. They are not that complex. It is simple search and scouting of relevant resources. One is creating and sharing a MERLOT personal collection (so they not only have to poke around the vineyard, they need to create an account, add some resources and write annotations). The second is search and discussion board posting of 3 MLX resources they could potentially use/adapt. The last was saving the results of a relavant Google Search as a web link. I am shocked people do not do this more often, likely the simplest way to exploit Google (in a good way).

There are a number of factors I am accepting my role in:

* It is a course taught previously by someone else, and I had made a bad assumption that this would be more faciiltating existing content. But we are having to re-do or modify much of the content as we go.
* I did not do nearly enough (or any) prep back in the fall, especially on getting familiar in new environment (WebCT) and even for this college, they were testing a newer version of WebCT than is in production
* Underestimating the range of experiences / skills in the class
* Grossly underestimating the complexity of the WebCT tools. it took one of our students (a colleague I know well and a tremendous classroom teacher) almost 3 weeks, and several visits to her college's support desk, to figure out the 12 steps it took to access, download, and view (on a Mac) an assignment posted in RTF format. WebCT makes for a lot of clicking, a lot of screen views.
* Navigation problems. We tried to simplify the structure because the previous course had about 3 places to locate assignments and activities. We got it down to more or less one, but we still find students getting lost, needing much more explicit directions. Options are great, but I am thinking fewer options for an online course may be better than more options.

I also think the course tends to be a bit more weighted on the mechanics (students getting tripped up in the WebCT HTML editor, finding where to submit assignments), too much assignment devoted to creating their course syllabus rather than process and activity focus.

In the previous course, one week "covered" Copyright AND Accessibility issues with suggested 30 minute readings from a list of external web sites and some online discussions. I think these are a bit big to be taking at a skimming of external resources, so am looking at writing something more focused and experiential Ie.g. case studies of visiting various web sites and asking them to decided what the fair use is for media there, how they would try and get permission, what their strategy would be if htey cannot get permission; and for accessibility some of the great simulations from Web-AIM)

But on the bright side, more than half, more like 70% of the students are actually sticking with it. You gotta love persistence. We are having them do some resource discovery activities at MERLOT and MLX,a nd in April we will have some participation activities in the Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference.

My teaching partner Kurt, who is likely carrying much more of the load in teaching so far, posted a nice summary to try and quell the beating drums:

I have been reading a few messages concerned about the clarity of assignments and activities within this course. It is interesting to me also because I expressed the same concerns when I took the course a few years ago. I guess there is still a lot of work to do :-).

Here is a summary of some of the concerns that I have read so far:

1. The assignments are not clear.
2. It is hard to navigate through this course.
3. I can't get my machine to work properly in this environment.
4. The discussion postings are not well thought out or do not illicit real thought.
5. It is hard to submit the assignments.
6. Not enough links that take you directly to the information you want.
7. How do I?

All the comments are valid comments for online learning environments. This is also partly why I posted the ACOT Continuum. Sometimes we are trying to teach people at various levels of skill and equipment where their needs are different. We have people in this class who are in the Entry Phase AND the Appropriation Phase and have different needs.

I would venture to say that 50% of all instructors who teach online (here at PC) are being thrown into that environment with little or no training and with 1-2 weeks to get the course up online. As you can see from your experiences, what a potentially disasterous situation that can be for students and teachers.

My recommendation is that you take some time to make notes of all these issues that you are facing and ask yourself "How would I change this when I am teaching online?" How would you answer students when they can't get their computers to work? Can you always solve technical issues? Can your help desk solve all technical issues? How would you clean up the navigation? How would you illicit deep, thoughtful discussions? Would you even use discussions? How would you deal with your students when they have difficulty submitting assignments?

Instructors who have taught this class over the years have debated whether to throw into the class some examples of "bad habits" just to see how students react. What if we didn't answer any emails for a week? What if we did have errors put into the organization of the class to show students how frustrating it can be for the student and the instructor?

We have sooooo many activities and assignments in this class to complete, sometimes it is hard to get everything coordinated and timed exactly. This course really needs to be a 15 or 16 week 3 credit course (in my opinion). It would smooth things out quite a bit. You in this course are at a disadvantage. We are using a new version of WebCT. Some of the materials for supporting the learning are difficult to come by. You also have two instructors working on development at the same time as the course is progressing.

The other day Alan commented to me on how much time it takes to put together just one weeks worth of materials for this course. He is correct. Online learning development takes a lot longer than face-to-face courses.

I encourage you to learn from your good experiences in this class and the challenging experiences. It will only help you to be a better online instructor. For our part, we continue to keep working hard to make things better for you.

Teaching is hard. Teaching online is very hard, and I am guilty of taking it more lightly than I should have. A good humbling experience that may send me scurrying back to my programming cave.

So I grabbed the opportunity when colleagues from one of our colleges asked me to team teach CIS 236, "Web Based Teaching and Learning"- an online course designed mostly for faculty to learn more about online teaching. The course was pretty much created, and I am leaning a great deal on Kurt as the experienced teacher. Our students are full time and part-time faculty from several of our colleges, some I know, many I do not, some have quite a bit of online / hybrid course teaching experience.

Therefore, I am the sheep posing in a fur costume ;-)

The course is delivered in WebCT, a rather new space for me. Actually I spend very little time inside CMS-es, about every 3 months I may answer a Blackboard question or admin a setting, but I've not done much "inside the box." As a web designer accustomed to an open slate, I would likely find them awfully stifling. On the other hand, I accept and support the appeal for mainstream faculty to focus on the craft of teaching and not the tools, and also to provide a fairly consistent environment for students.

In fact, the last time I worked in WebCT, it was still being coded at University of British Columbia, and user support was direct email with Murray Goldberg.

Anyhow, the course starts this week, we are doing good traffic of discussion board intros, Kurt and I are rapidly responding and inviting comments back. The book in use is Susan Ko and Steve Rossen "Teaching Online: A Practical Guide" , and having just found it Amazone.com-ed on my doorstep, it feels and looks practical.

I am trying to introduce a worthy amount of external resources, hopefully we will get to discussing blogs and finding relevant content (maybe RSS, no promises). In April, the class wtll have some assignments as participants in the Teaching in the Community Colleges Online Conference, the annual conference that originates fomr Hawaii, but has participants from around the world.

Bahhhh I am a Wolf!<